New Assignment and I feel good about this one. Stewie is meditating and then gets realizes he has a neighbor, good ol Tailor who startles him and scrambles to back away. the assignment I chose was to get up from sitting on the ground with the Stewie that has no arms (there fore no arms to assist in getting up making it more difficult.)

Planning for this was fun, a few near misses with my fireplace mantle but a lot of great off balance poses that I stumbles and managed to correct myself. Made for some great posing that I did over and over and over again with Stewie.

I’m now making heavy use of both the TweenKey and Anim Curve 3D plugins provided to AM students. The anim curve is like a much cooler version of the basic animation curves in C4D. Both have advantages and disadvantages. The main one in animcurve is that it often can corrupt the animation interpolation and if not caught before scrubbing, can freeze Maya. It is BETA after all.

I like that it can color the curves and show them all the time, and that when modifying keys along the 3D curve in the editor you have the actual axis gizmo to move along X Y and Z with more control. That said they are really slow and can often get in the way. Still I’d love to see MAXON developers take some time for once to enhance this feature which they’ve had for about a decade now with little or no change. (Bad as that may sound most apps don’t have such a feature built in at all really, including Maya)

Tween key is a handy little plugin for recording poses inbetween two other key poses, its pretty basic and simple I’d much rather be using tradigitools, but I will have to wait for them to get it working with Maya 2009. Basically these plugins let you record a pose at a specified fraction between the nearest two key poses. This offers a much more traditional type workflow like using drawings and favoring one key or the other. I love this workflow.

Busy week as usual, but I made sure to take some awesome advice from my mentor Mike Walling regarding inspiration. Back in high school and at VFS i had this trusty little 13 inch TV VCR combo hooked up to my PC that I would watch DVD’s and video on all the time. I don’t know what happened, well maybe its because I gave my sister that TV, but I sort of lost this concept. It wasn’t a distraction but more a constant inspiration anytime I looked away from what I was working on, Bam there was some cool animation on that would keep me going.

I also think it helped a bit with my common procrastinating by giving me a few seconds of something else to break up the grind without getting up and leaving to watch TV. So I ripped the old 27 inch TV from our Bedroom and moved the printer scanner to the side so that I now have a TV with video constantly while working, and I love it.

Now to the cons. First I’m still rehabilitating my back from NAB , so I have to get up and walk around often anyways, constant pressure on my lower back won’t help things. So the idea of the monitor keeping me from leaving the computer isn’t really working yet.

The other con is a big one though. After a recent DVD and BluRay rental at the local blockbuster a few weeks ago I looked at the price and knew that there are much cheaper alternatives like on demand., but Time Warner On Demand hasn’t really worked well for us. so I asked Rick at work about his Netflix account and how he liked it, and he not only recommended it but gave me a coupon for a longer free trial that they received for friends and family. Well I’m hooked already, haven’t even received the first disc but I’m catching up on heroes since I haven’t seen an episode since early season 2. So being inspiration and not a distraction hasn’t really worked out I wasted most of Friday night watching TV instead of working. Bahh what a stupid awesome invention. Damn you Netflix, Damn you.

Anyways here is the refined blocking so far, didn’t finish the end walk at all, but this is also a little different then what I handed in. I cut it down to the last five minutes on this one, too close. Sadly though I didn’t notice that a last minute tweak caused a major pop in my animation, it was a really stupid mistake, but there was not time to re-render and upload again, so I just added a note for Mike on my incompetence. Anyways I figured I’d fix that one issue before posting here. Anyways Enjoy.

Week 1 of class 2, which focuses on Psychology of Body Mechanics. The cool thing about this class is its really only 3 projects broken up into 4 weeks each, for each stage of the animation, Planning, Blocking, Refining (blocking +) and Final.

My new Mentor is Mike Walling, who has sort of been all over the place and worked at a lot of different studios, PDI, DNA, Blue Sky, and now Sony Imageworks, which to me, means exposure to several studio environments. While a lot will be similar from studio to studio I know even from studio tours for MAXON and such that each studio can differ a fair bit in how they work, and having a mentor who isn’t just saying this is how I do it because that’s how our studio does it, Mike can really say what it is like all over the place, and he’s had the chance to work with a lot of different animators too. I’m pretty excited to soak up as much as possible from him

So far the styles between Mike and Paul are quite different, Paul was a tougher marker and Mike says he has a similar reputations which is good I like a mark that really indicates how I am doing. But Mike doesn’t seem to provide a big email list of notes like Paul did after QA, but as I just noticed about 15 minutes ago, Mike likes to provide an overall class critique on his workspace which is just kick ass. Its good for a general note on what he is noticing a lot of people do and the importance of why certain things are assigned the way they are and what the purpose of things like sketching etc are for. I know I’ll be looking forward to these each week.

Anyways, I went out on the patio and recorded almost 40 minutes of reference trying each of the various options we had to work from for the assignment and chose to work with the large step assignment.

Well I’m already done the first class, and I seriously can’t believe 3 months has already flown by, two jobs and school sure helps me pass the time. No real assignment this week other than combining all my assignments into one reel, so here it is:

Tomorrow we find out who our new mentor and classmates are, its kind of cool that every three months we get new classmates and mentors. It really helps to build a community and friends and contacts. A big thank you however to Paul Allen for being such a fantastic mentor with great notes and advice. I’ll definitely make sure to pester him for another critique here and there down the road.

Wow the last assignment in for this term, now its just refining and making a progress reel of all my assignments for this term. Its nice to have a little more time this week as I’m currently crunching on a freelance job as well, and will be heading to San Francisco Thursday and Friday for GDC as mentioned in my last posting.

So for Next week look forward to a compilation of all my Class 1 assignments. For now Here is the finished character walk.

And Stu just practicing some Balance.